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Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

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Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#41

Post by jshen »

tptacek wrote: post #34
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is not fair today--that's the problem! ehow is an 11 year old domain name and they create millions of pages. They will out rank anyone due to: a) domain age b) flooding the index with dozens of pages around a niche topic (as opposed to one good one). google does NOT rank for quality... it ranks for signs of quality such as domain age, inbound links, etc. until google can tell that there 100+ spam articles on a…

This eHow page was written by a human being and convincingly answers a (trivial) question: http://www.ehow.com/how_13856_play-valentine-bingo.html This Mahalo page was written by a sloppy computer program and is a shotgun blast of random gronk schlorped on a page in the hopes of making it appear to answer a question that nobody, even at Mahalo, really thought about: http://www.mahalo.com/christmas-bingo/ If Google is…

Jason is right, your oddly skewed example isn't a counter to jason's point. Google doesn't rank based on quality, but a proxy that is gamable and is heavily gamed. I'm skeptical that they can ever effectively solve this problem.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#43

Post by phlux »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #22
patio11 wrote: post #16

You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content. We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10 I don't relish paying people for what are essentially search clicks that in an ideal world I would have outranked them for, but the alternative is not paying and getting no sale. Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something l…

VIDEO is our answer. We have been moving all of our content to a higher standard: 1. video 2. an EXPERT in the video with credentials 3. quality Q&A (with some paid folks answers questions... that we don't really promote) best jason

no offense, but video is slower to be consumed than reading - you can't easily copy video and paste it into an email/im/tweet with the same efficacy as text.

May I make a suggestion: transcripts. If you are going to provide video - provide a transcript of all the vids so they may be quoted. Make the transcripts hyper-links to the videos themselves.

So if people copy the text and send it - they send a link to the vid along with it.

I actually havent spent time on Mahalo, but just went over to look and I really like the how-to section at first glance.

One of the things that is an utter failure of Quora; they have a ton of top-notch people using it - yet they have done NOTHING to seek out and curate information from the experts such that it threads together.

For example, I go to the "startup advice" topic - and its a big pile of jumbled randoms.

I cant go and actually learn anything more than a snippet. (not to mention the ability to search/sort and view stuff. The UI/UX is HORRIBLE.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#44

Post by ohashi »

I just don't buy it. Aaron Wall called you out a while ago and if I recall correctly you denied and denied. This sudden change of heart doesn't read like a moral turn-around, it reads like surrender. You got out-competed by Demand, AOL, Associated Content and trying to re-frame the argument as 'we're all going to suffer if you don't cut back' is bullshit. If you really were turning around Mahalo and it wasn't going to be a content farm (whatever your definition of the term), all of this wouldn't matter. So arguing that everyone has to cut back would be silly, you should let them content farm and get banned by big bad google and you can take home all the prizes! But that's not what is really happening is it?

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#45

Post by dschobel »

And then one day someone will come along who pays his farmers $2000 per page and claim that Mahalo is polluting the web with their lousy $1000pp content.

The issue boils down to the fact that the search landscape is fundamentally a representative democracy. Google has a huge amount of power but if people become dissatisfied with the results, Google will be out the door quicker than you can say "altavista".

And here is Jason's problem: if people clicking the Google search results are satisfied with ehow, then ehow they shall get. Urging people to demand better content is a fool's errand.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#46

Post by ylem »

phlux wrote: post #43
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VIDEO is our answer. We have been moving all of our content to a higher standard: 1. video 2. an EXPERT in the video with credentials 3. quality Q&A (with some paid folks answers questions... that we don't really promote) best jason

no offense, but video is slower to be consumed than reading - you can't easily copy video and paste it into an email/im/tweet with the same efficacy as text. May I make a suggestion: transcripts. If you are going to provide video - provide a transcript of all the vids so they may be quoted. Make the transcripts hyper-links to the videos themselves. So if people copy the text and send it - they send a link to the vid…

I think there is a contrast. If I need an answer and I need it now, then yes, transcripts are quicker. But, suppose I want to learn say, javascript, then a video lecture might be more useful. I wonder if they will do ads within the videos like youtube.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#47

Post by ericd »

I am stunned. Calacanis was just brazenly lying about his belief in the quality of his articles and that it was just a few isolated articles that were thin. Now he claims he couldn't sleep as well at night before due to Mahalo's mounds of crap content. And apparently he's completely unrepentant about having to lie on behalf of his company, now taking a holier than thou stance against his competitors. Unbelievable. This is borderline sociopathic.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#48

Post by knieveltech »

ericd wrote: post #47

I am stunned. Calacanis was just brazenly lying about his belief in the quality of his articles and that it was just a few isolated articles that were thin. Now he claims he couldn't sleep as well at night before due to Mahalo's mounds of crap content. And apparently he's completely unrepentant about having to lie on behalf of his company, now taking a holier than thou stance against his competitors. Unbelievable. Th…

Borderline my ass, this is pretty textbook stuff.

Re: Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

#49

Post by groby_b »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #22
patio11 wrote: post #16

You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content. We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10 I don't relish paying people for what are essentially search clicks that in an ideal world I would have outranked them for, but the alternative is not paying and getting no sale. Case in point: I paid $100 for ads on eHow in January alone. (Of which something l…

VIDEO is our answer. We have been moving all of our content to a higher standard: 1. video 2. an EXPERT in the video with credentials 3. quality Q&A (with some paid folks answers questions... that we don't really promote) best jason

Great idea - hard to search, hard to cross-reference, almost entirely linear, slow to consume, much higher production costs. Yup. We need more of that.
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